


K.B.O.

by mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [15]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Doctor Who/Avengers Crossover Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 13:33:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,836
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Everything changed after the Doctor came to call.  In the Summer of 2009, Clint, River, and Coulson are adjusting.</p>
            </blockquote>





	K.B.O.

**Author's Note:**

> Here beginith _Phase 2_ of the _Marvelous Tale!_
> 
> As always, kudos to **like-a-raven** for being an incredible beta as well as an incredible friend.

_April – September 2009_

Everything changed after the Doctor came to call.

Not that you could really tell from the outside, Clint thought. Life at SHIELD went along pretty much as it had always done. Yes, an alien had landed on base and as a result reality as they knew it had basically been thrown into a blender without a lid. They still had jobs to do.

Business as usual. Or _keep buggering on,_ as River would say.

The Tesseract was packed up and sent back to its highly secure, highly classified vault (fitted with a device, courtesy of the Doctor, that would repel any more energy mites that might decide to snack on it). Their visiting flock of PhD’s flew back to their ivory towers. Orange tape and netting went up and construction began on the damaged areas of the Security Center. The eight SHIELD employees who had been rescued from the loading dock in the TARDIS were debriefed and reminded of their confidentiality clauses. Clint hadn’t heard anyone so much as breathe the word _alien_ on the base.

To anyone watching from the outside, Clint, River, and Coulson’s daily routines (such as they were) hadn’t changed. They trained in the gyms, sparred in the rings, and practiced on the ranges. They attending briefings and taught classes. They shipped out on missions when called up.

On the inside, though, things were very different. Life had fundamentally altered for all three of them. Clint knew that he would never be able to look at the world in quite the same way again. For one thing, he actually had the answer to one of humanity’s Big Questions. Aliens were among them, and apparently they were dressing like hipsters.

Which, when you thought about it, explained a _lot._

But that was the Grand Scale, and when you got right down to it, the Grand Scale was fairly impersonal. For Clint, the more important thing was watching the change in River. 

It didn’t happen all at once. In fact, for a week or so, things actually got a little worse where River was concerned. She was on edge and watchful by day and slept poorly at night. Clint knew that she was waiting for the other shoe to drop. She was waiting for Clint to reconsider standing by her or for Fury to go back on his word. But as time went on and the world failed to end, a shift started to occur.

River had always been self-assured. Clint watched her become truly at ease. He’d always thought she had a beautiful smile. He saw it start to become quicker and more frequent. He and Coulson had always been confident that River had their backs. Now she was letting them really back her.

Clint had never realized exactly how much weight River had been carrying on her shoulders until the day he finally saw her without it. Whatever might come of their new acquaintance with the Doctor, it was worth it just for that.

*****

Though Fury had promised to help keep River’s secret, he also insisted that one of SHIELD’s doctors be made aware of her “special circumstances.” Given the knocks they took in the field, the Director didn’t want any of them to be caught unprepared if her partially alien genetics could complicate a medical condition.

As Clint expected, River picked Dr. Judith Levine. Levine had handled most of River’s routine medical care literally since the day she’d arrived on base. Clint still remembered the priceless look on Levine’s face when he’d presented her with a gurney bearing the infamous Reaper, unconscious, trussed up, and running a raging fever thanks to an infected knife wound.

 _Agent Barton. And it’s not even my birthday_ , Dr. Levine had said.

Levine had had River on the mend in a matter of days. Even during River’s prickliest phases she had seemed to like and respect the other woman and her no-nonsense manner.

River asked Clint and Coulson to sit in on her meeting with Dr. Levine. They were happy to be there to provide moral support, though Clint thought Levine might have needed it more than River did. The four of them sat in a private, darkened consultation room, watching a hologram of a double-helix spin lazily in midair. Portions of the image were highlighted in white.

“I would like to state for the record _again_ ,” Dr. Levine said, “I’m a trauma surgeon, not a geneticist. But that?” Levine tapped a button on her control pad, brightening the white areas. “That shouldn’t be there.”

It was weird to actually see it, Clint thought. “And ‘that’ is. . .?”

“Not part of the human genome,” Levine said. “Alien. I’ve never seen anything like it, not even a theoretical model.” She tapped another button and the hologram disappeared. The lights in the room came up. Levine looked at River. “Are you absolutely certain you wouldn’t rather have Palmer on this? He has a specialized background in genetics. He’s more qualified.”

“I don’t trust Palmer. I trust you,” River said. She smiled slightly. “ _Mazel tov_ , Dr. Levine.”

Levine snorted, but just picked up River’s chart. At the end of the day, the woman was a SHIELD doctor. Rolling with the unexpected was part of the job description.

“Most of this we’ve been over before,” she said, reading her notes. “No allergies, no dangerous drug interactions. You’ve never had a bad reaction to a blood transfusion, which is kind of incredible considering the genetic divergence, but let’s not whip the gift horse. Has this held true when. . .when you’ve been other people?”

River nodded. “Most of my health problems have been the result of being hit, or shot, or stabbed. The usual workplace hazards. I never had much trouble with illness. The Academy made sure I was very well vaccinated. I was the only kid in my class who didn’t come down with whooping cough in 1941. I catch the occasional bug, but usually nothing serious.” River shrugged slightly. “On the other hand, I’ve never lived past a physical age of thirty. I’m really hoping to break that trend this time, but I don’t know how aging will affect me.”

“Well, we’ll keep an eye on things,” Levine said. “It won’t be hard to work some additional screens into your standard physicals, and I’ll handle those myself. I’ll also be on call for emergencies just as a precaution.”

“I’m sure I don’t even have to ask this,” Coulson said, “but all of this information is being kept strictly confidential, isn’t it?”

“It’s not even on the SHIELD server,” Levine replied. “Fury’s authorized a dedicated data storage device and the paper files will be in my safe. Trust me,” she added with a wry grimace, “I have no desire to have Nick Fury picking out my final resting place if your secret were to slip out via Medical. He’d probably plant me in Yankee Stadium just to be perverse.”

*****

Clint really knew that River was getting comfortable when her Scottish accent suddenly came back full-bore.

When River had been brought into SHIELD, one of the first things she had done was drop her native accent and adopt a bland American one. At the time, she’d told Clint it was so that she wouldn’t stand out. He had understood that. After all, River had been working as a covert operative. Blending into her environment would have been second nature. And in those days, she had viewed SHIELD as a hostile and potentially dangerous new environment.

She had loosened up over the intervening years, enough so that she’d slide back into Scots when she was safe in the company of her teammates. Now that her big secret was out and she was feeling more sure of her place, she was letting the tartan fly, so to speak.

Clint got no end of amusement out of the _what the fuck?_ looks this garnered from people at SHIELD.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you,” River said to him as they walked across base one day.

“Yeah. I am. It’s good to keep people on their toes,” Clint said. He glanced aside at her with a grin. “Besides, it’s sexy.”

River rolled her eyes, but couldn’t quite keep the corners of her mouth from turning up. “I could talk like a Glaswegian granny with a lisp and you’d think it was sexy.”

“I don’t have a clue what that means, but yeah, probably,” Clint replied. “No, I just meant that it’s good to see you being yourself.”

“Whoever that is,” River said. She looked decidedly rueful. “I’ve gotten rather used to being River Song the American from New York, but I did at least start out Scottish.” They walked along in silence for a moment before she added, “Have I ever told you how I started learning to do accents?”

“No.”

River had always been as proficient with accents as she was with languages (and knowing what he did now, Clint theorized that the two skills were connected). Once when they had been on lockdown in a safe house, when Clint and Coulson had been bored and River had been in the mood to humor them, they had tried to stump her. They hadn’t managed it. There was apparently nothing she couldn’t mimic.

“Back in the ‘40s, once the war really got going, Oban was identified as having significant strategic importance, at least from a naval standpoint. So, we had Allied troops from all over in and around the town. I started copying the ways they talked just for fun. It turned out that I was quite good at it. Most of them thought it was a laugh, so they egged me on.” River smiled. “Pvt. Frankie Lofton, he was my favorite. He was from Mississippi. I loved to listen to him talk.”

Clint started laughing at the vaguely dreamy look on River’s face. “You liked him.”

“I was _ten_.” River was unsuccessfully fighting down a grin. “And yes, there might have been a bit of a crush at work. It seems I had a weakness for Yanks even back then.”

“I’m not going to complain about that.”

*****

It wasn’t all smooth sailing.

Clint had warned River that there might be days when he’d get weirded out. He was glad to know the truth about her, but some days time travel, aliens, shadowy futuristic cults, and prophecies might be hard to process. He had underestimated exactly how hard those days would be.

There were days when the sheer unadulterated strangeness of their situation smacked him right between the eyes. He’d look at River and all he could think was _Holy fuck_. River was pretty good at recognizing those days and would back off and leave him alone to work his way through it. 

River had occasional bad days, too. Clint knew that she sometimes wished that she had never had to tell them anything at all and that they were none the wiser about her past. She went around with her hackles half-raised on those days, pushing at and provoking Clint and Coulson both. Clint was no shrink, but he knew it was a combination of wanting some space and wanting reassurance that her friends wouldn’t let her push them away.

They only ran into problems when their bad days coincided. Such alignments led to a few unpleasant arguments and one more serious fight before they started to settle more comfortably into their new normal.

“You know, what the two of you are doing isn’t easy,” Coulson told Clint after the big fight.

They were in Coulson’s office and Coulson had fished a bottle of whiskey and two glasses out of the bottom drawer of his desk. He poured a couple of fingers into one glass and set it in front of Clint, who slouched down tiredly in his chair. 

“You guys have been through a huge upheaval,” Coulson added, pouring a drink for himself. “Even when an upheaval is good, it’s going to create a ton of stress. And it’s not like there’s really a precedent for what you and River are dealing with.”

“Yeah? When did you become a relationship expert?” Clint grumbled, leaning forward just far enough to reach his glass.

Seriously, Clint knew Coulson was no monk. Hell, Coulson probably got more action than Clint had in the days before Clint and River had paired off. But Clint had never known his friend to see anyone for more than a couple of months, and that was at the outside. 

The only exception was Valerie the DC Layover, but Clint didn’t think that an old college girlfriend and quasi-regular hook-up counted.

Coulson just shrugged. “I’m not,” he said mildly. “But I know how people work, and I sure as hell know how you and River work.”

Clint sighed, tipping his head back. “Is this the part where you lay some fatherly wisdom on me?”

“Well, let’s not get carried away.” Coulson sounded a little amused. “All I’m saying is that you two are working through something hard. Don’t take a setback to mean that you’ve lost. It’s just a setback. Keep working on it. Keep talking. You two have a good thing. Don’t give up on it.”

“Yeah.” Clint drained his glass. He did feel a little better for hearing Coulson say that. It made him feel like he wasn’t kidding himself by believing that he and River could adjust to this. Clint felt a teasing smile coming on in spite of himself. “I never knew you were such a romantic, Phil.”

Coulson rolled his eyes. “Fuck romance. This is self preservation. There won’t be any living with either one of you if you two split up.” 

“I can’t really argue with that,” Clint said. He reluctantly set his glass back on Coulson’s desk. “I should probably go find her and do that. The talking thing.”

It turned out, as it usually did, that Coulson was right. Clint and River talked and butted heads and talked some more and decided they’d be damned if they gave up on what they had. Knowing the truth still made some days hard. But Clint knew that if River had gone on keeping her secret, it would have eventually torn them apart.

He’d take the trade-off.

*****

It wasn’t all fraught with tension, of course. There were plenty of other times when Clint and River could talk about things without a whiff of angst. Some of that was timing. Some of it was growing understanding. Some of it was adjustment.

Nudity didn’t hurt, either.

Lying in bed with River one night, floating contentedly in afterglow while River idly traced patterns between his sternum and his navel, Clint found himself silently laughing.

River raised her head from where it had been resting on his chest, brown eyes looking down at him quizzically. 

“I don’t remember there being a ticklish spot there,” she said.

“No, it’s just. . .” Clint shook his head. “I was thinking.” River propped her chin on her hand, clearly waiting for him to go on. “You know, I used to worry that I was too old for you,” he said.

He’d met River when she’d been, to all outward appearances, just over eighteen, seven years younger than him. They’d started sleeping together when, as far as he’d known, she’d been twenty. The age gap (as he’d known it) hadn’t exactly kept him up tossing and turning at night, but he’d acknowledged that there was one.

“No.” River smiled, amused. “Definitely not too old. In point of fact, _I’m_ the cradle-robber in this relationship.” She sobered slightly. “Does it bother you?”

“Nope,” Clint replied readily. Because it didn’t. Of the things about the real River Song that sometimes bothered him, the fact that she had about fifty years on him wasn’t even a concern. “Didn’t I ever tell you I have a thing for older women?”

River laughed and leaned down to kiss him. “Well, didn’t you just luck out?”

“Oh, believe me. I know I did.”

*****

Once she got over the hump, River seemed to find it a relief to be able to talk to them about her past lives, even if it was just about stupid, mundane stuff. They learned a lot about her at the most random times.

One day, when they piled into an SUV from the motor pool to drive into the city, Clint saw River smile as she buckled her seatbelt.

“You know, I learned to drive in a 1936 Morris Eight,” she said.

She had to hunt up a picture online later to show Clint what she was talking about. Clint grinned at the image of River, way back when, learning to drive that big, gangstery-looking car around the narrow streets of Oxford.

The mess hall, of all places, also proved to be good fodder for old memories. River had grown up in a Britain that had been subject to some serious rationing. Apparently, this had led to people getting creative with their food in some scary ways. River actually seemed to relish trying to weird her friends out by describing them.

“I’m sorry. You learned to make mock _what_ during the war?” Clint asked over lunch one day.

“Goose. Mock goose.” River grinned over the rim of her mug of tea. “We made it out of lentils and breadcrumbs.”

Clint made a face. “Why not just eat the lentils?”

“It wasn’t nearly as festive.”

Clint was also able to get answers to little lingering questions that River had always elegantly (and sometimes not so elegantly) evaded.

“So, where did you learn to play the piano?” Clint asked one morning.

It was dawn, and while SHIELD headquarters never really slept, at this time of day it was quiet. Clint and River had gotten up early for a run and had settled into an easy pace together on the loop around the perimeter of the base. 

“Elizabeth taught me,” River said as they jogged along. “She had a rough time of it, too.”

“Yeah?” 

Clint had a hard time believing that. Even before learning that River was a little more than human, he’d have thought there wasn’t much of anything she couldn’t sit down and learn to do. They’d known that River could play the piano; it had turned up in her file from Kirkwood. Clint had never seen River play for her own enjoyment, but she did it occasionally as part of a cover. Even rusty, she played well.

“Yeah.” River laughed a little. “When I was a kid—well, the first time around—I didn’t really have the patience for it. I was usually more interested in running around outside than practicing scales. Elizabeth despaired, she really did.”

“You obviously learned at some point, though.”

“I got the basics drummed into me, but I didn’t really start to pick it up until after my first regeneration,” River said. “Remember that personality shift that I talked about? My temperament was a bit more suited to piano lessons in my second incarnation.”

“Your temperament?” Clint gave her a teasing grin. “Does that mean you were nerdy?”

River snorted. “Maybe. I was quieter. Studious. Hell, I was practically _ladylike_.”

“Now you’re just screwing with me.”

She grinned in return. “I could still kick a guy’s ass, though. And not even get blood on my gloves.”

*****

Occasionally, Clint’s brain had a hard time keeping up.

“Do you know what the weirdest part about going away to war was?” River asked him one evening. They had a couple of days off and were hanging out in River’s apartment in the city, curled up on the sofa, watching a movie. 

Usually when River talked about “the war” she was referring to World War II, the war that had shaped her earliest years. It took Clint a moment to realize that she was talking about something else this time. She was talking about the _other_ war, one that was thousands of years in the future in another part of the galaxy. The Dianian War, the one that the Academy had arbitrarily decided to drop River—Melody—into the middle of so that she could learn to be an even better little soldier.

Clint could think of a lot of things that were weird about that, but he wanted River to lead.

“What?” he asked.

River had her head resting on his shoulder, calmly watching Russell Crowe gladiate his way through Ancient Rome. Whatever had made her suddenly decide to reminisce, it didn’t seem to be upsetting her.

“It wasn’t even _my_ war,” she said. “I had no personal vested interest in it, at least I shouldn’t have had. Before I went though, the Academy put this little thing in my head, like a patch of memories. It wasn’t a complete mind rewrite or anything like that; it was mostly background I’d have to know, skills I’d need, things that would make my cover second nature. I knew it was there. I gave Dr. Weatherby permission to do it, and I can’t deny that it was useful. 

“But it got confusing sometimes. Sometimes it was like there were two people rattling around inside my head—one who knew why we were fighting and believed in the cause, and one who stood back a bit and observed. Then occasionally we’d both just look at each other and wonder what the hell we were doing.” River tilted her head so that she could look up at Clint. “Even for me, that was weird.”

“I bet. It sounds weird,” Clint said calmly.

Internally he noted a few more creative ways he’d like to take apart Dr. Weatherby or Madame Kovarian or any other member of the Academy if he ever got his hands on them.

“So, do you still have it? That little patch?” he asked.

“No.” River settled in a bit more comfortably against his side. “It burned up when I regenerated. I suppose that’s why it all seems even weirder in retrospect.”

“Yeah,” Clint said, resting his chin on top of her head. “I’m sure that would do it.”

Clint was coming to realize that River’s relationship with the Academy would never not be complicated, even though she had cut ties and run away from them years ago. On one hand, they had been her family, her one constant, for decades. River freely admitted that, at least early on, she had thrived under the high expectations they’d placed on her.

On the other hand, she hated them for what they had done to her: manipulating her, lying to her, turning her into someone who could kill coolly and efficiently. River had spent most of her life being moved around like a piece on a chessboard, and frankly Clint was just surprised she hadn’t told the Academy to go fuck itself long before she had.

His own feelings on the matter weren’t exactly straightforward, either. It made Clint a little sick to think about what the Academy had done to River. But if the Academy hadn’t stolen River and bounced her around in Time, he would never have met her.

Clint knew that he’d never be selfless enough to wish that had never happened.

*****

He caught River staring off into space one day. She had a look in her eyes that he knew promised messy turmoil of some kind under the surface and he asked what was wrong. A few months ago she would have brushed it off or made a joke or found some other way to distract him.

Today she just sighed and smiled ruefully.

“It’s Elizabeth’s birthday,” she said. “Or it would have been.”

“Oh.”

Clint wasn’t sure what else to say. The subject of River’s foster parents was something of a minefield.

“I still miss them sometimes,” River said. She looked up at Clint. “Do you think that’s crazy?”

“No.” Clint sat down beside her. “I don’t think that’s crazy at all. God knows, there are people that I miss that I have mixed feelings about.”

“Barney?” she asked.

“For one,” Clint replied. Hell, his brother topped the list. “I keep wondering if I’ll ever hit a point when all of that feels. . .not fucked up.”

“Well, I have a bit of a head start on you there,” River said. She nudged her elbow against him with a half smile that made her look more like her usual self. “So, if I ever reach that point, I’ll let you know.”

Clint laughed. “Thanks.” He nudged her back. “Run? Swim? Target practice?”

Fortunately for them, they knew all the tricks to restoring each others’ mental equilibrium by now.

“I’ll race you to the pool.”

*****

SHIELD agents were experts at whistling past graveyards, which is how Clint, Coulson, and River wound up having a betting pool on when the Doctor would show his face again.

“And you solemnly swear that you have no insider information?” Clint asked, passing River another beer.

They were on the back patio at a bar that they semi-frequented, trying to catch a bit of a breeze on a muggy August night. 

River held up a hand in a salute that could have meant anything from _scout’s honor_ to an intergalactic sign for _up yours_.

“All I know, and I’m basing this off of one incredibly confusing day nine years ago, is that by the time the Doctor, Amy, and Rory go back and find me in Queens, they apparently know me pretty well. As far as details of how that happened, though, they really didn’t go into them.”

“Do you think it was because they were afraid of altering the future? Past? Whichever,” Coulson asked. “Maybe they were afraid of creating some kind of paradox.”

“Maybe,” River said. “But like I said before, Time is elastic. It’s always in flux. It changes around us constantly. Usually we aren’t even aware that it’s happening. It gets more complicated the closer you travel to your own time stream, but I think it’s far more likely that there were just too many other things happening then.”

“So, realistically, we have no idea when the Doctor might show,” Clint said.

It had been four months since the Doctor’s visit to the SHIELD base and Clint still found himself keeping one ear attuned for the distinctive sound of the TARDIS. 

“None,” River replied. “It could be a year from now or it could be in the next five minutes. There’s absolutely no way to tell.”

But when the Doctor did turn up again, they all knew the plan. The Doctor, Amy, and Rory were to be kept in the dark about River’s identity until after they’d experienced the Battle of Demon’s Run, whenever that might be. River was only willing to trust the elasticity of Time so far and didn’t want to risk having her time line rewritten. If Amy and Rory knew that they would one day have a baby only to lose her, they would naturally want to try to circumvent it. 

“Well,” Clint said, “here’s to putting one over on a Time Lord.”

“I’ll drink to that.” River smiled and held up her bottle. “When the time comes.”

“When the time comes.”

Three bottles came together in a quiet clink of solidarity against the busy New York night.

*****

Coulson won the betting pool not a month later, but he, Clint, and River almost didn’t live to settle up.

They were in Instanbul on the tail of some ambitious and morally questionable weapons developers. Their intel had led them to a bunker several stories underneath an abandoned apartment building. They found the mother lode of explosives. Unfortunately, the man in charge decided it was better to set a match to the lot than let SHIELD get their hands on it.

The entire building was coming down, and no matter how far they were from an exit it was _too_ far.

 _Jesus Christ, we’re going to die_ , Clint thought. _We’re really going to die this time._

And that was when he heard it.

Clint’s ears caught the sound over the rumble of several tons of wood and stone crumbling over their heads. He squinted up the swaying staircase through the haze of dust and smoke, and broke into a grin.

Damn if that blue box wasn’t a welcome sight. Clint didn’t know how or why, but it was parked on the landing right above them.

Thank God River kept her head. She grabbed him and Coulson each roughly by an arm and propelled them up the stairs. “What are you waiting for? Get inside!”

There were three loud exclamations of surprise when Clint, Coulson, and River, coughing and covered with dust, threw themselves through the doors of the TARDIS, landing hard on the control room floor. Clint felt hands pulling at him and rolling him over. He blinked grit out of his eyes to see a thin, inverted face peering down at him. 

Clint fought down an insane urge to start laughing.

“I’ve got to hand it to you, Doc,” Clint said. “You have great timing.”


End file.
